Why?

Adventures of a Modern Day, Middle-Aged Hero, on the Glory Road(to family security)

11.22.2013

I'm a week early!

It's that time of year when those of us with freezer/pantry space should be looking for deals. Last week, I found boneless turkey breasts on sale at Safeway for $3.00 a pound...which, is not a bad deal when you start shopping at the grocery store deli, and realize you can rarely find sliced turkey for under $7.00 a pound.

I bought two of them, which is thawed in the fridge, and then brined last night.(gallon of water, 2 cups of kosher salt, 1 cup brown sugar, bay lead, cinnamon stick, rosemary, whole pepper corns).

Today, I pulled them out of the brine and rinsed them off, before throwing them on the grill for an hour and a half(indirect heat and wood chips to give them some smoke...temp between 250 and 300), and then placing them in a 350 degree oven until the got to 170 degrees.

After I pulled them from the oven, I let them cool to right around room temperature, before starting to slice them as thin as I could by hand.

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Now...here is where the math get's wonky, and I need to do some more research. I ended up with just around 2 pounds of sliced turkey on that plate...which is not what I expected to end up with. I'll admit...I pulled some fairly inedible skin off each breast, and I did some sampling during the slicing, and my wife had one slab of turkey that was probably 3-4 'slices' thick for her dinner(passing on my pancakes). But...we didn't do enough sampling to account for a 66% weight loss.

One thing that has my highly curious is how much the turkey breast initially weighed. You see....the package came with a pouch of 'turkey gravy' already wrapped up with the bird...and I'm willing to bet it weighed at least 8 ounces...and maybe even close to a pound. That's a pretty huge difference, and I wish I had weighed the breast prior to starting...and still a label around to glare at. Did the label say 3lbs total? Can I got stick it to Safeway because they said the turkey was $3 a pound, when it was really 2 pounds of turkey and 1 pound of gravy in each package?

All I know is that this mystery is the difference between 'Great Deal' $3 a pound turkey, and 'That had better be the best stuff you've ever eaten' $8-$9 a pound turkey.

Luckily, while the final calculated price is not as cheap as I hoped it would be, the sliced turkey on that plate is about 17 times better than anything I ever bought at the store deli counter.

statement

"What did I want?

I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The games' afoot!" I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon.

I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be -- instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is."
-- Glory Road, Robert Heinlein